12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Interactions between black holes, stars, and galaxies
Jamie Law-Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz
A physical understanding of the high energy interactions between black holes, stars, and neutron stars, coupled with the context of their galactic birthplaces, will allow us to use these systems as tools to better understand black holes at all masses, the lives and deaths of stars, and the dynamics in galactic centers. In this talk, I will discuss one particular interaction: the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. I will present the STARS library of tidal disruption event simulations and will show that all our simulations can be reduced to a single relationship. I will present the chemical structure of the disks formed after tidal disruption—a key step in understanding the spectra of these events. I will also connect these AU-scale events to kpc-scale galaxy physics: I will present a systematic study of tidal disruption event host galaxies in the context of the local galaxy population, and in particular our finding that they are highly centrally concentrated. We expect ~50,000 tidal disruption events detected with LSST over 10 years, allowing us to use these events as unprecedented probes of supermassive black hole demographics, nuclear stellar populations, the physics of super-Eddington accretion, and dynamical mechanisms operating in galactic centers.